The report highlights the impact of violence on the health of populations in the municipalities of Buenaventura and Tumaco, where the medical organization Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) provides health services to populations who are victims of violence.

Approximately 500,000 people from the Northern Triangle of Central America (NTCA) cross into Mexico every year, fleeing violence and poverty. MSF, as a medical humanitarian organization, and through its medical programs, is witness to the reasons that have caused these people to flee from home.

How Europe ignores the consequences of outsourced migration management

November 2015

This report seeks to draw attention to some of the humanitarian and medical consequences that have resulted from the enforcement of past migration cooperation deals. While the intended impact may be to prevent people from reaching Europe, MSF has seen unacceptable unintended impacts, which includes widespread abuse; expulsions of vulnerable groups to the desert; prolonged detention; and the criminalisation of asylum seekers, refugees and migrants, undermining existing legal frameworks for their protection.

Europe had a shocking “rentrée” from the summer holidays this September. As government officials returned to their suits and offices and kids throughout the continent returned to school, the Greek islands had become a highway for people fleeing war. In a matter of days the highway extended through to the Balkans on the tracks of a previously less trodden migration path into the European heartland. In no time thousands of people amassed in Hungary’s borders as this government attempted to halt their advance.